Voters rejecting the war on drugs is a win for public health

Enlarge / On Tuesday, Washington, DC voted to decriminalize psilocybin, and Oregon’s voters approved two landmark reform measures—Measure 109, which legalizes psilocybin therapies, and Measure 110, which decriminalizes personal possession of drugs, including cocaine, methamphetamine, and opioids. (credit: Getty Images)

As election night ended in the United States, people went to bed still wondering who had won the presidential race, which party would control Congress, and what the future held. But one subject unified the electorate with unexpectedly decisive consistency: drugs.

When asked to relax laws around the use of psychoactive substances, voters said yes, whether they were in the reddest red states or the bluest blue. New Jersey, Arizona, and Montana all voted to legalize recreational cannabis. Mississippi voted to legalize medical marijuana, and South Dakota legalized both recreational and medicinal uses of weed. “Whenever drug reforms were on the ballot, they won quite handily,” says Leo Beletsky, an epidemiologist and the faculty director of Northeastern University’s Health in Justice Lab. “That shows a hunger for major shifts and reforms across party lines.”

People want a truce in the War on Drugs. Cannabis has been rebranded as a wellness panacea. Mushrooms and MDMA are making headlines as therapy tools, not party fuel. And as the overdose crisis continues, it is ever more apparent to a growing swath of the country that threatening to jail drug users doesn’t reduce drug-related death rates or help families struggling to save their loved ones. Instead, it disproportionately hurts Black communities.